Dstroy's NEW grow journal

dstroy said:

1/26/18

day 29 of flowering for the BB

day 23 since sprouting for the grape ape

aero res
pH 5.7
ppm 800 <==increased concentration
temp 68f

Still been steadily working on my user interface, it's got another solid day or three of work left to do on it before I can graft it into my other code. I've got to remove all the existing calls to serial.print in the greenhouse ino after setup. Then test it to make sure it doesn't "break" while I'm away.

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SSGrower said:

That's how I ended up with a second complete control unit, needed a prototype board for testing. Too many oops, fuck, that didn't work, reload old program, back to drawing board.

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dstroy said:

Prototyping is hardest for me, I like to make too many revisions. I try to keep testing and maintenance in mind when creating things.

I use my "test" mega, and make sure the loop keeps running even with everything disconnected, with certain things disconnected etc.

If all else fails the WDT resets the controller.

Next on my to do list after this is panic mode code, like if the power goes off right now it keeps spraying like if the lights are on (extended feeding times) which isn't necessary. My power failure solution is very simple.

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SSGrower said:

Dont the solenoids default to closed when powered down? Or are they mechanically latched?

Edit thinking about your set up this is probably it - your battery backup powering them?

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dstroy said:

Yes battery backup. No, they’re NC. But if the lights aren’t on, there’s no reason to spray them for as long as when they are, because the vpd is usually lower because temperature decreases after lights out. I could write some code that controls feeding times based off of vpd but I don’t want to do that because I would rather have some code that detects power loss and then does minimal survival stuff.

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SSGrower said:

Although I have gone more than 24 hrs without power before, it hasent happened in a few years, since excel replaced a major line in the area, but it still flickers and knocks the power out for a second then comes back on, thats the point behind those delays I wrote into my code.

Guess I lied when I saidmI wasnt going to be upgradidng system, need to work on code for hacked humidifier so the arduino can control thanks to another user that posted their homemade nebulizer.

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dstroy said:

Have you looked at “blink without delay”? I use code like that extensively to “fall through”(?) my code. I’ve got v2 of my program mostly done, be been running it since yesterday. Just going through and reformatting the indents and such to make it easier to read.

I learned something yesterday that I didn’t know, when you declare an integral ie a “number” ex thisnum = 1000 * 60; the compiler assigns 1000 and 60 to the int type. This will overflow and return a negative number even if thisnum is an unsigned long. You have to force the compiler to treat it as a long by including “L” after the integral ex 1000L.

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SSGrower said:

I was having troubles getting some of my calculations to speed up and slow down time to work, the math was right on paper but something caused it not to work. When I Changed the variable type from int to float, the functions worked but the info output via serialprint only updated every 7 seconds or so (would repeat the same time several cycles through the loop then update). I get the sense if I try this L thing and go back to int it will correctly resolve the issue.

Looking at blink without delay now, I think I saw this when I first started, thanks for bringing me back to it.

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